Feb. 12, 2019
Joshua Geltzer co-wrote an article for Politico about the fight against ISIS in the aftermath of the U.S.'s withdrawal from Syria.
The two of us spent years working on terrorism at the highest levels of government, under presidents of both parties. We’ve seen everything from al Qaeda’s surge to global prominence in the wake of 9/11 to terrorists’ increasingly sophisticated use of the Internet to recruit and radicalize followers—Chris as a military intelligence officer and then Defense Department civilian, Joshua as a Justice Department official and then National Security Council lawyer, and both as senior directors for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.
Never before have we been more (cautiously) optimistic about the battle against the latest and most dangerous terrorist group, the Islamic State or ISIS. Forged in the ashes of post-war Iraq and revolutionary Syria, ISIS quickly swept across vast swathes of the Middle East, establishing a so-called caliphate that took enormous amounts of U.S. military power and diplomatic ingenuity to disrupt and degrade. At the height of its power, ISIS boasted some 100,000 fighters in arms and controlled a territory of 41,000 square miles in Iraq and Syria, while developing a dangerous terrorist network that could strike in the heart of Europe and beyond.